From news editor Daniel Silliman: Anglican Bishop Jack Iker did not consider himself an evangelical. He was an Anglo-Catholic, and for him that was decidedly not evangelical. In his arguments, he always appealed to apostolic tradition in a way that a Southern Baptist, Assemblies of God, or Church of Christ minister would not. I decided to write an obit for him anyway. 

We sometimes wrestle with the question of whether or not to write obituaries for nonevangelicals. Will it seem as if we are claiming them? Will it appear to readers that something got misconstrued, either the religious movement or the person who has passed? Christianity Today is, after all, evangelical, and our reporting covers evangelicalism.

My rule of thumb is this: If the person impacted evangelicalism in a significant way, then I want to write about them at their passing, regardless of their personal evangelicalism. So we have an obit for a Protestant theologian whose thinking was engaged by a lot of evangelicals, even though he wasn’t one, and a Jewish archaeologist, and now an Anglo-Catholic bishop who once called evangelicals his “strange bedfellows.”